Connective tissueReaders name the final body worker We’ve identified 19 locals who impress and intrigue with their body work (and their body of work), but there’s one profile missing. That’s where you come in. We want to hear from you. Who’s working with or on the human form that you think we should know about? Who do you think rounds out this series of portraits? Send your nominations, over the next couple of weeks, to editor@c-ville.com. Tell us the name of your local nominee and make the case for that person. Include his or her contact information. Don’t forget to include your name, phone number and e-mail address, too, so we can reach out to you to learn more, if we need to. Be sure your nominee is working with or on the human form. Then, check C-VILLE in the coming weeks for the final figure. If you’ve got an idea, put your body in motion and send it our way. |
It’s the unifying fact of the human condition: We come into this world with one thing and we depart with only that, and it is, of course, this vessel—the body. But along the way, the things we do with our form can vary greatly. Some of us give it little notice at all, living upstairs most of the time, so to speak. Others of us have a keen sense of our fingertips (tap tap tap), but are maybe a little fuzzy on how to fuel this great machine. Overall, we live in a decreasingly physical culture with fewer spaces to run around in, fewer manual chores to perform, and more miles to log in the rolling cage. The “body” can become some vague expanse between our cell phones and the gas pedal. Not so for the people we’ve enrolled in the C-VILLE 20, Class of 2008. With the theme of “the human body” as our guide, we have found and now introduce to you an assortment of locals who work, play, or research the human body. They make those 206 bones and 706 muscles their concern every day, each in his or her own way, as unique as a fingerprint.
He spins right round
Adam Nelson
You might think that the world’s best shot putter is the biggest dude with the strongest arm.
You would be wrong. In fact, the shot put requires extraordinary quickness and flexibility.
“A lot of people think that shot putters are big, slow, dumb animals,” Olympian Adam Nelson says. “Most of us, I think our first three or four steps are as quick as anybody else in the world.” His best 40-yard dash time is 4.54 seconds—a time a lot of pro football players would covet. He can also do a high kick that would be the envy of the cheerleading squad.
Why should a shot putter be fast and flexible? It all has to do with generating force behind the toss. There are two basic shot put throwing styles—gliding and spinning. Nelson is most definitely a spinner . He builds momentum through his rotation that propels the 16-pound shot from his fingers with enough energy to go 73′ 10"—Nelson’s personal best (and 10th best in the history of the sport).
Compared to some elite shot putters, the 6′-tall Adam Nelson is a scrimpy guy. Sure, he’s 255 pounds with ham hocks for legs and arms, but in the realm of Olympic level shot-putters, he’s a runt.
“The flexibility allows me to generate a greater distance that I can apply force on the ball,” Nelson says. “And so for me, the source of my power is through my hips, whereas for some of my competitors who tend to be 6’4" 300 to 350 pounds, they can rely a lot more on brut strength.”
Nelson, 32, is a successful runt, however. He won silver at both the Sydney and the Athens games. After finishing his first year of business school at Darden, he’s got one more chance at gold in Beijing if he wins a spot at the U.S. Olympic trials in late June. Not bad for a former Dartmouth football player who only picked up the shot put in eighth grade because he got cut from the baseball team.
Also playing into Nelson’s success? He has managed to avoid major injury. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t paid a price. In addition to stresses one might anticipate, Nelson’s throwing hand is significantly larger than his left hand. “We tape our wrists and that traps the blood up into the top of the hand, and as we throw, more blood gets pushed up into it as we shake.”
Has Nelson ever regretted exchanging a normal hand for Olympic greatness?
“I guess I’ve never really thought about the physical sacrifices,” Nelson says. “I’m married, so I don’t have to worry about those things too much, right? It’s just part of the game.”—Will Goldsmith
Dead man talking
Mark Fields
It’s 1988, Suffolk, Virginia, and Mark Fields is hours into his first day as police, in the passenger seat of his field training officer’s cruiser, forcing himself not to look at the speedometer. Victor’s at the wheel, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. The two are rolling down Route 10 on their way to a pedestrian fatality, sirens wailing.
They arrive to a set of shoes in the road and a body. Fields looks at the legs: broken at the height of a car’s fender—bumper fractures. The shoes. The lack of blood or skin on the road between them and the body. These are pieces to a story that went something like this: The car parted the man from his shoes, sent him airborne before he skidded to a stop.
“He basically traveled along the roadway as a vehicle in motion,” says Fields 20 years later. He stops and considers. “If you’ll pardon the expression.” A hint of a grin, sheepish. “A body in motion is probably a better way to put it.”
Fields is the Charlottesville Police Department’s forensic detective, and to him the body is a physical chapter in a narrative that he was not there to witness but must work backwards to tell. It is a fountain of information. It, unlike a person who he might interview, cannot lie.
“The human body is an incredible organism,” he says. “It can take a lot of punishment. It can adapt to substance abuse, environmental abuse, and it can survive. But we’ve all seen that it’s a fragile organism, and it doesn’t survive some things.”
His language, it’s clinical. Crime scenes are physics experiments taken to deadly conclusions. Objects in motion, outside forces.
“I’m not trying to be cold and scientific,” he says, “but—and this is my personal opinion—the essence of who they are is not there any more.” Instead, what Fields works with is evidence.
It may be easy to think only of blood spatter and bumper fracture, until you picture Fields years ago, working a SIDS case in a home daycare. Picture Fields as he was, dead child in arms, hiding in the kitchen from the other children and parents until they’re gone.
Back on the road he hits the breaks, the speedometer drops, and he is on the phone with his girlfriend, in tears.
“Even though that 5-month-old was really no longer a 5-month-old,” he says, “it was a baby.”—Scott Weaver
All things in moderation
Kate Bruno
Can exercise be too much of a good thing? The country is getting fatter and unhealthier by the minute, so surely people who exercise religiously and make their workout a daily priority should serve as examples of virtue to the rest of us, right? Not necessarily, says Kate Bruno, the registered dietitian and personal trainer who, from her Northern Albemarle office, is gaining a rep as the go-to counselor for people known as exercise bulimics who want to get off the treadmill. Literally, to get off it.
“Exercise is a more socially acceptable form of addiction,” says the 31-year-old Bruno, herself a recovered anorexic and obsessive exerciser. “Some people recognize it and say, ‘I’ll just live with it.’ Yet, it taxes their lives in many ways.”
Like the woman who had to stretch for 30 minutes following every meal. Or the woman who combined strict exercise regimes with extreme food restrictions—six-mile runs and 800 calories or less each day. Or those who cannot go on vacation for fear of missing a workout.
By the time they come to Bruno—maybe sent by their parents, if they’re among the growing number of teenaged girls with disordered exercise and food behaviors, or maybe on their own because their joints are literally giving out on the stair climber but they can’t keep themselves from ascending that last floor—she strives to restore balance to their lives. “They should understand they can still love something like exercise and have a healthier and happier relationship to it,” she says, serene and accepting.
And where does she start? Sometimes at zero. As in helping people to accept the idea of no exercise whatsoever for three to six months. Nada. Zippo. Nothing that is what she calls “intentional.” A walk with a friend or time in the garden? Fine. A slavish session on the recumbent bike? Maybe not. So what happens when extreme exercisers are coached to let it go, or at least cut back?
“They start to face all the emotions that are masked by the Band-aid of working out,” she says. But, metabolism being what it is, they don’t necessarily get heavier, which can be a surprise. The point is, Bruno strives to restore exercise as a part of life, not life itself. And then Bruno will work with her clients to reintroduce moderate, healthy portions of exercise back into their lives. She even has a workout studio below her office where she’ll coach once-extreme fitness fanatics into gentler, more sustainable routines. By then, many have realized the value of letting go.
“In some cases,” she says, “if you commit three to six months to intensive work to figure out the addiction, you can get the rest of your life back in peace.”—Cathy Harding
Dressing the part for the departed
Joe Fields
Joe Fields jokes that his daily gray business suit zips up the back “like a firefighter.” He allows one of his five kids to pick out his necktie in the morning, but the suit he wears as a funeral director at Hill & Wood Funeral Service is a ubiquitous gray, day after day, and it’s always on, whether Fields is leading a funeral service or responding to a 3am call to collect the dearly departed from someone’s home. Considering some of the physical requirements of the job—lifting dead, often sick and diseased bodies from their sites of expiration—you’d think a HAZMAT suit would be more appropriate, or at least a pair of jeans and rubber gloves. But that’s not what the grief-stricken look for in a funeral director. They want the solemn, respectful gray suit, and though Fields can find the funny in it, he’s happy to oblige. He says being a funeral director is the only thing he’s fit to do.
Perhaps it’s in his blood. The Wood in Hill & Wood is Fields’ uncle, Paul, who joined the Hill family’s Charlottesville funeral home business—which dates back to 1907—in 1975. Fields’ brother, Kenney—who is 19 years Fields’ senior and became sole owner of the business in 2000—joined Uncle Paul in 1990 and hired his kid brother right out of high school. Fields says he was originally attracted to his big brother’s place of employment because it paid 25 cents more an hour than his car washing gig. Eventually, he got a degree in mortuary science from John Tyler Community College and became a licensed funeral director in 2003. As to why he’s right for the profession, he says it’s because the job is “not monotonous.” Daily tasks run from word processing and accounting to event planning and, yes, embalming bodies.
But that’s just math and clinical stuff. What does it take to deal with dead bodies every day, to prep them for viewings, burials and cremations, and to do all of the grim work behind the scenes and still emerge in a well-pressed gray suit to coordinate sometimes 300-plus grieving friends and family members with compassion and patience?
“First you have to be mentally challenged,” Fields jokes, confirming that a sense of humor is a must. But more seriously, “You have to have a concern for others’ well-being. It’s important for people to see their loved ones at peace, without pain and without the tubes and respirators and beeping sounds they’ve sometimes been hearing for weeks. You don’t want that to be their last image.”—Katherine Ludwig
Blurring the gender divide
Deborah Justice
The way Deborah Justice sees it, analytical psychologist Carl Jung was dead on: There is man in woman and woman in man. “The characteristics that we as a culture assign to men and the characteristics assigned to women are all coming alive to all of us,” says the Nelson County painter. “We need to be all of who we are.”
Nowhere is this philosophy more evident than in Justice’s paintings—the ones made in the decade when she was recovering from a devastating car accident that traumatized her brain and forced her to relearn how to use her body in nearly every sense. They feature transformational figures like butterflies and chrysalises as well as hermaphroditic figures—“intersex,” she calls them. Justice says that as she rehabilitated and the two sides of her brain were reintegrated, she “moved through a line that blurred genders.” You’ve heard of transgender? Justice refers to her journey as “transcendent gender.”
“When I was able to get up and over the idea of who men and women are in my culture, my whole world opened. People I had thought of as the Other were not the Other anymore.”
Which brings us back to Jung—or The Replacements, if you prefer—and androgyny. Not only in her paintings, but now as a speaker, too, Justice urges people to be more accepting and less fearful about blended gender identities. Particularly, as a lesbian, she wants to coach people not to freak out or draw too many conclusions about sexual identity should they happen to recognize feminine attributes in men or masculine attributes in women (“homosexuality cannot be caught,” she says as an aside, “but homophobia can”).
Ultimately, Justice says, “artists have always had a tendency to cross that gender divide and explore it. In the rest of life, it shouldn’t be about seeing everybody as a character and if they deviate from that, they’re wrong. The culture itself is allowing more room and I want to encourage it.”—Cathy Harding
On hand from the first breath
Donna Vinal
Donna Vinal has delivered about 10 babies a month for the past 15 years. As the only certified nurse-midwife (CNM) in Charlottesville, she’s in very high demand. As a midwife in Dr. Edward Wolanski’s obstetrics and gynecology practice, Vinal avoids administering pelvic-numbing epidurals, and instead uses a “bag of tricks,” including massage, herbs, homeopathic remedies and water relief to alleviate pain and ease delivery. She’s popular with pregnant women who want a natural and holistic approach to childbirth, but may be uncomfortable birthing babies in their own bedrooms with a lay certified professional midwife. Of further appeal: Vinal stays at the side of her patients from the time they enter the hospital through hour 12 (or 26) of labor. In other words, she’s on call 24-7.
“I couldn’t do this job if I had my own kids,” she says.
They may not be her own kids, but Vinal definitely has a maternal connection to her patients and their progeny. Her office bursts with photos showing Vinal lovingly cradling pink and pickled newborns and intimately embracing exhausted but ecstatic parents. There’s a scrubs-clad, smiling Vinal perched right in the goalie spot between spread legs, drenched in amniotic fluid after her patient’s water had broken all over her. She says she keeps that photo on her desk to remind her that birth is beautiful.
“It really isn’t yucky. The blood and the mess—it’s just not there for me.”
What is there for her is the joy of coaching women through an intense physical process that she calls “sacred” and the thrill of holding a brand new life in her hands.
It was a desire to catch those little bodies out of the birth canal that led Vinal to become a CNM after several years as a labor and delivery nurse and a professor at UVA’s nursing school. In Virginia, CNMs can deliver babies without the direct aid of an obstetrician, as well as perform certain other medical procedures and prescribe medication.
Speaking of which, Vinal feels that in many cases, the human mind, body and spirit can succeed without such intervention.
“It depends on what you believe about birth. Some women want to be disconnected from the experience. But for those who want to be connected—it’s possible. Women are pretty strong creatures.”—Katherine Ludwig
Inside a pumped-up world
Tristan Bridges
Because of the size of his neck, the subjects of Tristan Bridges’ study called him “Pencil.”
“They find it hilarious when your head is wider than your neck,” he says of the male bodybuilders he spent a year interviewing and observing from 2004 to 2005. Assigned to write an ethnography, Bridges—a Ph.D. student in sociology at UVA—had taken his interest in gender and masculinity to a gym, scouting for topics, and soon observed that the freeweight area was a peculiar, male-centered space. From here, he embarked on weekly visits to four bodybuilding gyms in Richmond and D.C. It was a world ripe for study.
“These were guys with thighs as big around as my waist,” he says. Most worked out twice a day for a total of four to six hours; they had jobs bouncing at clubs or moving furniture and dreamed of getting into Flex magazine and winning competitions. “They eat unbelievable amounts of food,” says Bridges, who observed them in restaurants rattling off orders like “four hamburger patties, no buns, cheese on the side, and four eggs.” Two weeks before a competition, they’d start purposely dehydrating themselves to make their skin draw closer to their muscles. “On stage, they’re at their weakest,” says Bridges. It wasn’t uncommon for guys to take oxygen during a competition or to pass out once they’d left the stage. And steroids were rampant, though no one would admit to taking them.
“They’re very conscious of the fact that it’s not healthy,” says Bridges. Several bodybuilders told him, “If my health fails me it’s fine, as long as I’ve made it before that happens.” The obvious question—why do they do it?—has a clichéd answer, Bridges says, namely that bodybuilders are “scared little boys inside.” He found the truth to be more complex.
While many had in fact been teased as kids for being small, their exaggerated adult physiques were not a free pass to being seen as manly. “They really are stigmatized,” Bridges says, recalling an incident when he and a few bodybuilders went to an action movie and, after leaving the theater, were laughed at by a group of guys in business suits. Bodybuilding in pop culture has become a joke, not like when the universal hero of the sport, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was Mr. Olympia. At the same time, many bodybuilders had received—and accepted—offers of money for sex.
Bridges came to believe that bodybuilding is just an exaggeration of the socially influenced “body projects” that everybody performs: crossing our legs, wearing deodorant, taking smaller steps if we’re feminine and bigger steps if we’re masculine. Bodybuilders and everybody else tend to “stay in environments where we’re comfortable with how we present our gender,” he says. “I thought I’d be this feminist guy who took bodybuilders down,” he says; instead, he found himself “more sympathetic to how all people interact with gender. …Masculinity is a burden too.”—Erika Howsare
Changing the face of war
Adam Katz
There are two sides to every story. While the American death toll in the Iraq War—now over 4,000—has understandably been the main focus of the media, the other, and perhaps even more sobering statistic, is that the number of wounded is now hovering around 30,000, according to both anti-war.com and globalsecurity.org.
Enter Dr. Adam Katz, a plastic surgeon and researcher at UVA, who earlier this year joined the brand new Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM)—specifically, the “subgroup that has to do with burned skin and scarring,” he says. Soon, in addition to doing cell-based lab work here in town, he will apply his expertise to wounded soldiers at the United States Army Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio. “I hope to fly down there two or three times a year,” he says.
“They do something that a lot of us don’t want to do,” Katz says of the soldiers sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. “I feel privileged and honored to give back. Second to that are the opportunities to bring new technologies forward. Politics doesn’t come into play.” Those new technologies are crucial to the realities of 21st century warfare. “My understanding,” he says, “is that in the armed conflicts nowadays, so many fewer people have died. There are a lot more significant injuries to the face. The chest and torso are usually protected. What I’m trying to do is help [the soldiers] feel better, but also to try and get them back into society.”
In other words, Katz’s aim is facial reconstruction, and not a dressing up of burn wounds, as in traditional skin grafts. The origin of his method is the procedure—“already done for plain cosmetic reasons,” he says—of taking fat from one part of the body and reinjecting it in another part of the body, where the fat has the potential to, as he describes it, “release signals that will improve skin quality.” Katz wants to take all this to a new level by injecting fat under skin grafts to see if it can alter the scarring process and make the wound area “more like the way it was.”
Katz says the long-term goal of AFIRM is the regeneration of limbs and fingers, as well as the regrowing of skin and nerves. But even greater future possibilities don’t take anything away from how bright the present looks.—Doug Nordfors
Developing the flesh
Allison Harbin
There’s a lot at stake in an Allison Harbin portrait, and not just concerning her photographs themselves. In a series completed during her third year at UVA, where she majors in both studio art and psychology, Harbin covered friends and roommates with materials including mud mask and soggy tissue paper. Then she used a hair dryer to sear the tricky textiles to their skin—an application process that took upwards of 45 minutes before shooting could begin.
The results—large-format photos developed in a 40-minute “palladium process” that subtly tones each image—are an eerie homage to the body’s struggle against time. Harbin’s mud mask portraits give her subjects a pebbled, naturally worn look; her tissue paper photos, on the other hand, are grotesque, if still majestic, evoking everything from exposed vessels and veins to third-degree burns.
“I wanted to do something based entirely on visual cues,” says Harbin of the portraits, which began as a series of self-portraits. Harbin snapped photos of her own body, noted where natural lighting cast shadows on her back, traced the dark valleys in black paint and then recreated the shots. In her tissue paper and mud series, Harbin’s photos recall the physical degradation and high status of Greek sculpture. Combined with the worn metallic hue of the palladium, each portrait appears as devastated by time as the crumpled body it holds.
“They’re chipped and worn down and degraded in a way that makes them beautiful in a different sense,” says Harbin.
Art students at UVA typically do not exhibit their work until their fourth year, so Harbin has one more year to tinker with a few projects before she decides what to show (though you can start looking for her work in, of all places, upcoming catalogues from Plow & Hearth). She is currently working on a collection of photos that document the lives of a family of African Americans that have worked and lived with Harbin’s family in Georgia for years, and another series of portraits that pairs human bodies with natural elements like sod and dirt, yet to be started. Like a fine wine—or, more appropriately, unlike our mortal, buckling bodies—Harbin’s photographs will improve with age.—Brendan Fitzgerald
The path to Allah
Nooruddeen Durkee
For 40 of his 70 years, Shaykh Nooruddeen Durkee has been a practicing Muslim, which means that he prays five times a day. Before he can pray, he must first wash in an act of ritual cleansing called Wudu’.
As he described it, the right and left hands must be washed up to the wrists, followed by a rinsing of the mouth. Then water is sniffed up the nose and blown out. All these must be done three times, then the face has to be washed, followed by the forearms, the neck and ears, and the feet.
“The whole thing can be done in about a minute and can be done anywhere,” he said. “The bathroom sink, for instance.” He decided to demonstrate, walking around a partition toward the Islamic Center’s small restroom, but first stopping to utter a few words in Arabic that translate to: “I take refuge in Allah from the accursed Devil/In the name of Allah, Most Merciful/Most Compassionate.”
Then he entered the restroom, stopped in front of the porcelain sink and knelt forward. Turning on the faucet to a slow trickle, he cupped water and went through the routine in a matter of moments, splashing water here and there. It could only have lasted a minute or so and within no time we were seated once again in the center’s main room. “It can be looked about as just hygienic or as purification of the heart,” Durkee explains. “You wash your hands from all the things you shouldn’t have put your hands on, your mouth from all the lies you may have told, your eyes from what you may have seen, your ears from what you hear, etc.”
As the Shaykh indicates, Wudu’ serves a two-fold purpose, initially providing a matter-of-fact cleansing of the elements of the body normally open to the outside world. Beyond that, if mere mortal man is to go before a pure god, the outward cleansing symbolizes a spiritual ritual by admitting that you are unclean before the creator of all. “What it can mean has a lot of ramifications to it,” the Shaykh says. “You can go as deep as you want to go with it.” As simple as it is to perform, the practice of ritual purity is easier to break. “Just being dirty, working under your car, passing wind, things like that,” Durkee says, naming a few ways to violate minor purification. “Before you pray, you always make Wudu’.”—Jayson Whitehead
Making an inter-species connection
Tim Lincoln
Less than a century ago, the practice of Reiki was codified by a Japanese man who claimed to be channeling “universal life force energy” through his body for the purposes of healing. According to Reiki tradition, the body has five “chakras,” or spiritual centers where energy flows to and fro.
Ninety-some years later, Tim Lincoln received this same gift when he had his chakras attuned by a local master, bringing them into alignment, and thus, spiritual harmony.
“I was coming out of an extremely conservative religious background at the time, and I would go, ‘What am I doing here?’” he recalls. It was in the earlier part of this decade and the Sperry Marine manufacturing engineer had stumbled across Reiki at a vegetarian festival. His wife was ill, so he figured maybe it could help.
“I felt silly, but then that night my energy started flowing,” he says, explaining that he got what’s called the Reiki flu as his chakras were balancing out. “My head felt really hot, and my hands were extremely hot.”
That’s how it feels as the Level III Reiki master now crouches over a chocolate brown Chesapeake Bay Retriever named Ernie who suffers from rheumatism. The old dog’s joints are tight and Lincoln waves his palms slowly over the hindquarters to relieve his stiffness.
“I just put my hands on him and intend that the Reiki energy would flow and it flows,” Lincoln says, the top of his head beaded with sweat.
“Does that feel good, Ernie?” he asks. The dog sits up, and then stands as Lincoln continues to hold his hands over the dog’s shoulders. “He’ll also get up and position himself around where he needs the energy the most. He likes it.”
Lincoln doesn’t work only with animals, but when he does, he says he also channels energy to talk with them—mostly horses and dogs—to find out where they need treatment. As Ernie begins to wander off, Lincoln recounts the first time that he talked with a dog. As part of a class, he was told to remotely contact a classmate’s pet. In his hotel the next morning, Lincoln held a photo of the dog and tried to send a message, asking the dog to name his favorite food.
“Chicken,” the dog responded.
What a novel choice, Lincoln remembers thinking. Then the dog spoke again. “He says, ‘Oh, I gotta go now.’” Words were forming right in Lincoln’s head as the dog excused himself to go eat breakfast.
So Lincoln wrote the time down and when he got to class asked the pet’s owner when she had fed her dog. When she said around 6:15am, Lincoln was shocked, then pleased. “That’s when I knew for sure that I was making a connection.”—Jayson Whitehead
The final work
Teresa Martin
There is a phrase in hospice, “actively dying.” Much like a person shuttering the windows of an old house, readying it for closure, then snuffing out the furnace’s pilot light, the body shuts down, step by step. Teresa Martin knows this process well.
A hospice nurse for six years, Martin works in a part of society that we regularly curtain off. She helps shepherd patients through the process of dying and their families through the process of watching and caring for someone dying. She watches over a person who is parting with his or her body, watching that separation, helping to ease the pain of that body and the fear and grief that are its accompanists.
After working as an ER nurse at Martha Jefferson Hospital, Martin quickly learned that emergency nursing wasn’t for her. But while she was there, a seasoned nurse took her aside one day and told her that she was the hospice nurse type.
And there is a type.
“There are certain people who don’t want to be around death and dying,” says Martin. “What it takes is someone that realizes their own end of life. You have to realize and be comfortable that this is what occurs. This is the process that occurs in everyone.”
What Henry James called “the distinguished thing” is perhaps the one great democracy, though it is also unique to each of us, or will be. “The body takes us in different avenues, depending on the diagnosis that we have,” Martin says. “What you would see in a person with cancer you would never see in the dementia patient. Until you get to the actively dying phase.
“Some people have more will to live than others, and some people have less. It all depends on what they’ve gone through, and how willing or acceptant they are to give in to the process of dying.”
The separation of the body from the person can be stark, like the seamstress who announced, “I’m going to make this beautiful dress” moments before dying. Or it can be unapparent.
“We have seen people in different scenarios waiting for people to come, or waiting for children to leave,” she says. “Do I think they have some kind of sense? Personally, I do. The body itself is declining, but do they have a timing? They do.”—Scott Weaver
He sings the body electric
Conner Lacy
The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative goes black and two flashlights flick on. Participants pass the beams around and point them at a human figure with wires attached to his body. As lights and limbs shift, so do the sounds that emanate from the room’s speakers. Though he’s not wired up and in the spotlight, Conner Lacy, seated off to the side at his laptop, is the artist behind this performance.
| Video from the performance of Conner Lacy’s Lunasuit at The Bridge. The performance was presented by the HzCollective. |
Flashlight tag it ain’t. Lacy’s “Lunasuit” consists of five light sensors that, with the help of a computer, control sounds depending on the changes in the performer’s interaction with the light.
“I like tying technology to the body to understand the energy that affects us,” Lacy says. “It’s using technology for your body’s sake, for remapping your body and understanding it in a new way through the use of something really simple.”
The suit’s light sensors correspond loosely to some of Hinduism’s chakras, physical points of spiritual energy. The forehead sensor represents intellect and triggers tiny sound samples of cicadas. “I picture them as brain synapses working really fast,” Lacy says. The heart, a point of compassion and humanity, is translated into soothing wind chimes and pulsing drums. The root sensor, at the gut, is matched with low human voices. Sensors on each hand affect the pitch, speed and rhythms of those sounds.
“We have these natural receptors,” says Lacy, referring to eyes and ears, “but we can balance them and understand that they are connected.” Thus the Lunasuit lets the body translate visual light into a sonic experience. “The fun part of it is sensing things outside of our biological dispositions,” he says.
A recent UVA graduate, Lacy isn’t fooling when it comes to exploring connections between light and the body. He has “light” tattooed on his left shoulder and says the body is important as well. “It’s not about transcending your body,” he says. “It’s about using your body and reevaluating the experiences we have through it.”
Lacy presented the Lunasuit at the school’s annual Digitalis computer music festival at the end of April, a few days before The Bridge performance. In the fall, he’ll head off to Mills College in Oakland, California, to pursue a Master’s degree in electronic music. In the future he hopes to build more Lunasuits and give them away. Maybe you’ll have one in your own wardrobe some day.—John Ruscher
When once is not enough
Jim Tucker
So get this: Dr. Jim Tucker, a professor in the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at UVA, is hard at work researching reincarnation.
No, our hallowed University hasn’t allowed a crackpot to squeeze through the cracks of their professional veneer. Far from it. First of all, Tucker is continuing the extensive work of Ian Stevenson, former director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at UVA, who died in 2007. Second of all, Tucker, thanks in part to his 2005 book, Life Before Life, has himself become a leading voice in research “suggestive of reincarnation,” as Stevenson was always careful to put it.
Here’s the deal: In addition to cases of children verbally expressing details of past lives, there are cases of children born with birthmarks or birth defects that match the wounds of people who have died violent deaths, such as by a gunshot or a car accident, or that can be linked to people who have died because of diseases such as cancer. Tucker begins Life Before Life with the case of a New York City policeman, John McConnell, killed on duty in 1992, whose grandson was born with “birth defects that were very similar to the fatal wounds” he suffered, and at age 3 began making references to his mother about how he was once her father.
Tucker has so much to ponder, including the question that if these cases are so often related to violent and otherwise dramatic deaths, where does that leave the concept of across-the-board reincarnation? “You can make a case that sort of argues against it,” he says. But he doesn’t concern himself too much with abstract theories. “You don’t have to come at it from any religious bias,” he says.
In Asia, where belief in reincarnation is widespread, people actively look for cases. The situation is different in America. “A lot of families won’t speak here,” Tucker says, either about marks on their children’s bodies, or things their children have said. Tucker is out to change that. “I’m trying to focus on American cases,” he says. He has compiled a database of close to 1,500 of them (278 of which involve birthmarks or birth defects), each coded for over 100 variables, so that he can trace emerging patterns. “I was recently in Seattle,” he says, “where a girl there has begun talking about a big house fire, and has given one last name.”
And you thought being an academic researcher was dull….—Doug Nordfors
Readers’ guide to what goes inside
Rita Smith
In one universe, people are obsessing over the cellulite on their thighs and tweaking their energy levels with smoothies made from acai berries and agave nectar. In another, their bodily concerns are more basic: Keep the blood sugar under control, keep the cholesterol down, avoid dying of heart disease.
It’s in that universe that registered dietitian Rita Smith teaches her “Supermarket Smarts” classes at the Giant store in Seminole Square. In this unassuming location, twice a month for more than 20 years, Smith—whose usual workplace is Martha Jefferson Hospital—has led troupes of students up and down the aisles, preaching the gospel of fiber, carb counts and saturated fat. One monthly class covers nutrition for the diabetic; the other focuses on heart health. Both are free.
Smith is an elfin, likeable guide through the world of packaged cheese and canned butter beans—the kind of teacher who walks backward while leading a group and calls the heart “your little ticker.” On a recent Tuesday morning, when five women and one man, all seemingly over 60, showed up for her diabetes class, she wore slacks the color of chocolate (by the way, eating a little of the dark variety each day is O.K., she says) and a sweater, her eyes bright under a cap of tight curls. She shook a container of prune juice back and forth and read out the carb count per serving: 43 grams. “That’s your whole meal!” she exclaimed, referring to the guideline that allows a healthy eater 30-40 grams of carbs in each meal.
In another aisle, she gestured to the dozens of olive oil bottles. Twenty years ago, she remembers, there were only two choices for olive oil. “Look at it now!” she said. Crisco lurked on the bottom shelf; some of the students snickered at cans of lard. “You know lard makes the best pie crust; I do it every Christmas,” confessed one student. The store seemed full of pitfalls—pasta sauce that’s full of hidden carbs, sherbet with a surprising amount of sugar compared to frozen yogurt—but Smith teaches people to read labels and navigate mazes of nutrition guidelines. “Some people come once a year and make sure they’re on track,” she says. She’s been doing this so long that she doesn’t remember how she got started.
As class wound down and people folded up the guidelines on yellow paper that Smith had handed out, one graying student said, “I’m trying to get my husband eating better. He doesn’t like vegetables.” In her age, she’s a fairly typical student for Smith, but sometimes college students show up too, or women’s running groups. “Come with a friend, come with your mom, come with your husband,” Smith says.
Indeed—everybody needs to eat.—Erika Howsare
Clown princess
Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell
Someone sent in the clowns last year, and behind each grease-painted grin, each prankish pose and riveting, rascally expression was Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, ringmaster of her own circus.
During the past year, Tidwell protested the depiction of Sacagawea in the Lewis and Clark statue on Ridge Street as “Miss Representation,” and raised thousands of dollars for female-run nonprofits as “Rosie the Wrist Twister,” the emcee of the Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers. She directed the Shentai arts extravaganza at the Frank Ix Building as a mustachioed carny named “Pepin Schmetterling,” then performed in the Live Arts production of Mother Courage and Her Children. She brought us mimes and caricatures on stage and then, when she was done, took her act to the streets.
Tidwell is a combination of theater genetics and learned behavior, nature and nurture joining to make her a sort of performance chameleon. As a member of the now-defunct performance group Foolery, Tidwell inherited her physical performance chops through founding members and expert clowns Martha Mendenhall and Thadd McQuade.
“As Brecht has shown us, we use humor to keep people’s minds open, to keep them from shutting down,” says Tidwell. “Everything I do is a clown.”
But Tidwell also does her homework, drinking deeply from the pools of pop culture to create her uniquely memorable misfits. “I choose things that are common in people, almost cliché, and watch real people do those,” says Tidwell. For her role in Mother Courage, Tidwell watched videos of “Wheel of Fortune” damsel Vanna White. “Miss Representation” took her lead from “Miss South Carolina,” the “Miss Teen USA” contestant that memorably mangled her response to a simple question in 2007. Each character addresses some issue, from Rosie the Wrist Twister and gender equality to Miss Representation and historical injustice, through the cultural symbols that Tidwell digs up and tries on.
This multitude of characters, Tidwell’s parade of clowns, connects with something the actor practiced while working with McQuade, a performance exercise in which she put her body “into crisis,” as she calls it, by acting out specific physical tasks and speaking over them. In her Shentai performance, for instance, she chose to appear from a box wearing a pair of enormous metal hips, a costume she describes as “very cumbersome and almost painful.”
“I find that giving yourself that sort of limitation—whether it’s external or just something you’re doing physically—helps you pay more attention to what you’re doing,” says Tidwell. Of course, it makes us pay a bit more attention, too.—Brendan Fitzgerald
Laughing her way to love
Leigh Meredith
Laughing robustly to oneself for no apparent reason: It’s a sign of madness, yes? Not if you’re Leigh Meredith. For her, it’s a sign of a life pointed in the right direction.
Meredith teaches Laughter Yoga, a highly physical practice that is almost zero percent yoga in the traditional sense and 100 percent laughter in the nontraditional sense. Meredith guides people towards their internal wellspring of joy and acceptance by getting them to laugh for no reason whatsoever.
“We’re very used to living in our logical minds and they say, ‘Something is funny and therefore I laugh.’ Laughter Yoga says, ‘I laugh and therefore something is funny.’”
In her classes, Meredith builds through a series of laughing exercises (chuckling, laughing without sound, laughing melodically, laughing in character—a party hostess, or a hale businessman) to a five-minute crescendo of uninterrupted—and contagious—laughing. You lie back, gaze at the ceiling and pump that diaphragm to keep the sound coming until your stomach muscles ache and your lungs are refreshed and you can’t quite remember what had you so stressed an hour ago when you walked in.
Still, let’s face it, the rational mind, as Meredith terms it, might scoff at such foolery, harrumph at such hearty letting-go. In that case, Meredith herself is an inspiration. With her corkscrew curls and sparkly eyes and that wide-open, at-the-ready smile, Meredith is…twinkly. Lighted from within. Joyful. Easy to laugh with.
It was not always so.
Meredith struggled for years with depression and anxiety, she says. But a course in Laughter Yoga at Yogaville motivated her to dedicate time every day to laughing—and she’s seen big changes in her life ever since. “The more I practice, the less depressed I am, the less stressed,” she says. “I laugh so much more and have noticed…it’s so much less problematic for me to be kind and more loving and less judgmental of myself and others.
“We teach,” she says of her new calling, “what we need to learn.”
She says there’s real science to back up these observable changes, too. Laughing releases feel-good endorphins, promotes greater absorption of oxygen, increases mood-lifting seratonin, and more. Indeed, it was reintroduced as a therapy in the past couple of decades by an Indian physician. And it’s said there are more than 5,000 Laughter Yoga clubs that meet around the world.
Locally, Meredith teaches workshops at Studio 206 and has plans to take her courses into the regional jail and city parks, where she hopes to connect with homeless people.
And along the way, she’s chuckling and smiling and guffawing and tittering to herself as much as you can. “The more you laugh, the more you laugh. The more you laugh,” she says, “the more you love.”—Cathy Harding
You and your batteries
Tess Sprouse
“I was watching a show on ‘Oprah’ about doing what you like to do, doing what makes you happy,” Tess Sprouse says. “I like going to people’s houses, talking to them, and all of this helps women, and I like empowering women.” And if a woman feels empowered in the bedroom, she says, scanning a table of sex toys, “then that confidence will [be evident] in the way she performs, she acts, the way she exudes herself.”
An insurance company employee by day, by night Sprouse is a Passion Party Consultant, one of several women in Charlottesville who will organize, for you and your friends, “The ULTIMATE Girls Night In!” She will show you a vast array of edible lotions and lubricants, vibrators, clitoral stimulators, G-spot massagers, and other fantastically hi-tech, semi-anatomical rubber and plastic sculptures, all designed, Sprouse says, to enhance relationships. “Even if it’s just you. You have a relationship with yourself.”
All types of women attend Passion Parties. Gay or straight, young or old, they’re for anyone who’s interested, open-minded and respectful. “Some lesbian couples are looking for something more penetrating,” Sprouse says, “some completely don’t want that. …Last bridal shower, I had an 18-year-old, I had a 70-year-old, and everyone in the middle. …I got to the lubricants part and the 70-year-old said, ‘I need that! Give me about a case and a half! I went through menopause and I don’t have anything left!’ She was the life of the party.”
Sprouse is 34 and married with three daughters, 11-year-old twins and a 15-year-old. Surprisingly, for someone who spends a lot of time being very open with strangers, Sprouse says her daughters don’t know the extent of what she does (it’s an open question, of course, whether that will still be the case after this week). “They know I go to parties,” she says, “…they know I have some lotions.” Once they turn 18 she’ll tell them the whole truth. Now, however, they usually respond to their many mother/daughter talks about sex with, “Do we have to talk about it again?”
Their mom, on the other hand, never gets tired of talking about it, and her “fun job” has given her a philosophy of openness and respect. “Each person is in charge of their own space, and their own aura, and their own self. So if they want to be sexually open, then they can. If they choose to be sexually repressed, and they’re comfortable with it, then that’s fine as well.
“I don’t judge anyone. This is what I do. Everyone has sex, in some way, shape or form. That’s how [our] existence is continued. …If you’re single, this is the safest way to have sex. There’s no diseases, it’s just you and your batteries.”—J. Tobias Beard
Man in the mirror
SavVas
“There are certain things you identify as being you,” says SavVas. “And when you look in the mirror and don’t see those things looking back, you start to try to find what you can do to change things.”
When SavVas—just SavVas, he says—looks in the mirror, he sees countless bracelets and sharp-edged rings that lead from his fingers up his arms. He sees his nipple rings, or covers them with a mish-mash of cloths and jewelry that refer to portions of his heritage—parts Greek, Cherokee Indian, Swedish and Scottish, garments that he crafts himself into a Mad Max-style coat of armor. He sees the wild pink fin of his dyed hair, a gaggle of earrings in each ear. And, above his eyes, two permanent black bars.
SavVas decided to tattoo his face when he was 24 years old. He’d first pierced his body years earlier—at 18 or 19 years old, he says—but, as you might imagine, tattoo artists aren’t exactly itching to drag their needles across the arch of someone’s eyebrow, say, or the fleshy patch above their ear.
SavVas had moved from New York City back to North Carolina, near his family, and was hosting gothic dance nights at different clubs in the city. “To do these shows,” he explains, “I had to shave off all my facial hair, including the eyebrows, and I got very sick of drawing them on all the time.” After his eyebrows were finished, tattoo parlors were more willing to work on his face; he added a lotus flower and the symbol for “Om,” both revered symbols among Eastern religions.
The reason? Well, why do you cut your hair or paint your nails? There’s no greater reason to SavVas’ appearance besides the same reasons we have for going to the gym or dieting—he saw something about himself that he didn’t like and he changed it. The facial tattoo, he explains, was just a way of reshaping his face. “Kind of pulling and tugging at things,” he says, “without actually paying for surgical technicians.” The difference is perhaps one of resonance. You may not notice a week’s work at the gym, but you notice SavVas wherever he goes, without fail.
In 2004, SavVas came to Charlottesville to visit a friend, and essentially never left. Through a few acquaintances, he found jobs hosting gothic dance nights similar to those he ran in North Carolina; currently, he hosts the monthly Umlaut event at Rapture’s R2 space and, along with Chad Van Pelt and Patrick Allen, runs The Dawning.
“The crowds at the Dawning have always been really strong,” he says. “We could definitely attract 150-plus, but they just never come out at once.”
And this is where SavVas’ body comes into play as an organizing mechanism. During my conversation with him, we’re interrupted half a dozen times by friends and casual acquaintances, all ages, all types, all his friends. As goth music host, SavVas is a celebrity among a certain crowd of people, but his physical appearance makes him his own publicity agent, a billboard for his own image.—Brendan Fitzgerald